“They Had the Brains but They Didn’t Have the Expertise”: Black Working-Class Women and the Nurse Training Program at the Taborian Hospital, 1940s–1960s

Abstract:This article rescues from invisibility Black working-class women nurses who staffed the Taborian Hospital in Mound Bayou, Mississippi. In 1941, the Taborian Hospital introduced one of the state’s first nurse training programs that offered Black women economic opportunities beyond the fields of the Mississippi Delta. The article asserts that while many struggled to meet state requirements that promised higher wages and social mobility, Black women nurses introduced a health politic that defined health care activism before the 1960s. In so doing, they demonstrated that civil rights included the right to access to medical and nonmedical care that was dignified, quality, modern, and uplifting. This article expands the historical canon by placing working-class Black women nurses, who were essentially shut out of the professionalization movement because they did not redirect scant family resources to enroll in traditional nursing programs, alongside middle-class Black nurses and Black midwives.